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Xen 4.3 releases today with ARM server support

The Xen Project makes its first release as a Linux Foundation collaborative project today. Xen 4.3 includes a technology preview of support for ARM server hardware, improvements in the open source hypervisor's performance and security and updates to its collection of tools, including another technology preview of integration with the software driven network switching tool Open vSwitch. The Xen developers say they are now working with the upstream QEMU project to make it easier for Linux distributions to package Xen. This collaboration has also enabled support for PCI pass-through between both applications.

Working together with their contributor community, the Xen developers have validated their ARM port on ARMv7 and ARMv8 platforms. To move the ARM server support from the technology preview stage to a production-ready features, the project is working together with the Linaro Enterprise Working Group and several hardware vendors, including Calxeda. Enhanced security capabilities in Xen 4.3 include improvements to the virtualisation solution's virtual Trusted Platform Module (vTPM) that allows guest operating systems to have access to their own unique software emulated TPM and can only access keys that are shared by the system's vTPM manager domain. Xen's security framework XSM and the FLASK security model were extended to cover unprivileged APIs as well as privileged ones.

Xen 4.3 will be released later today; its source code is licensed under the GPLv2. More information on all new features in this release is provided in the Xen 4.3 Feature List on the project's wiki.